Our next target in space?

Lots of reaction to my earlier article on the Nautilus site, asserting -- (proving!) -- that 2015 was by far our best year, ever, in humanity's forward exploration of the cosmos. Now let's follow up with a look at where our ambitions should take us next.

(Further down... see a weird-wonderful type of Time Travel via gravitational lens!)

== Should we go back to the moon? ==

NASA has determined that its long term destination for astronauts will be the surface of Mars, with asteroid retrieval and appraisal in lunar orbit as the intermediate step. Lunar orbit is perfect in many ways. Others have different ideas, though.

With their new video, The Moon Awakens, the European Space Agency declares its goal to send humans to Luna over the next decade.  This article says “ESA has become increasingly bold with its lunar preferences." Both China and Russia are also aiming to explore the moon. And several private endeavors hope to turn it into the most expensive and high-status of all aristocratic tourist destinations.

Really? Fine. It’s closer and in many ways easier. Those who want the moon are welcome to it. I do not object to others repeating or improving on the Apollo missions. Indeed, if romantic billionaires want to boldly go or take small steps of their own, then hurrah for them, subsidizing that realm for the rest of us.

But I am far less impelled by romanticism than by pragmatic considerations. Indeed, very few scientists or space-resource folks feel even slightly tempted by the moon, in the near term. 

1- The lunar surface lies at the bottom of a steep gravity well, fairly expensive to descend and depart through.  

2- None of the samples brought home by astronauts, nor minerological satellite data from orbit, are indicative of fractionation-separation of elements into what anyone on Earth would call "ores" or concentrations of useful materials, except apparent ice deposits at the poles that were predicted long ago by Jim Arnold, my doctoral committee chair at UCSD. 

Indeed, one would be hard pressed to offer up even a theoretical way that substantially useful ores might exist there. According to current models, the moon was made from chunks of the Earth's crust torn away by a giant collision... after Earth had already experienced separation of heavy metals sinking to the core. Hence any metals on the moon's surface would have been delivered later, by meteoritic impacts. And yes, there may be iron rich impact debris fields. Perhaps you could get some by dragging magnets... just as one might mine a little ice at the poles...

3- But that is harder than going to the source... meteoroids themselves! See this video from Planetary Resources on the economic advantages of mining asteroidal resources. (And now Luxembourg declares their intent to help mine asteroids, teaming up with Planetary Resources and Deep Space Industries.)

4-  Suppose you do find a lunar debris field rich in meteorite bits and drag them together.  You then use solar concentrators to melt and separate and shape them, right?  Only on the moon you have 2 weeks of darkness each month.  Meanwhile asteroidal solar smelters work around the clock.

5- Back to the one "ore" we know-of --those polar ice deposits. Those could be nice. But so far, they appear to be too small and too valuable to just grab and use-up, willy nilly, sucking Luna dry, in order to fuel activities elsewhere. To my mind, they belong to future generations of moon colonists -- loonies, not wasted as rocket fuel. 

6- Please. Do not bring up Helium 3. Not till you show me a fusion reactor that will use the stuff. (Though it was a way-cool gimmick in Iron Sky.) Oh, sure.  Let's land a few rovers to check lunar soils for embedded solar He3.  It's called science.

7.  This should not be true. But it seems your political-partisan leanings somewhat predict whether you are an asteroid zealot or a loonie... sorry lunati... oh, never mind that.

8. The moon is not a way station to Mars. It is not a way station to anywhere.  Lunar orbit is.

I could go on, but why? I don't mind some rich fellows funding return to the moon. But scarce tax dollars should go to basics, empowering the tool sets that entrepreneurs might then use, to give us a true space industrial basis. NASA's plan to use cis lunar orbit as a marshalling yard is brilliant. We could do asteroidal tests there, and also service those fools... I mean bold folks... who spend their own money to go down to the lunar surface and prove me wrong!  

Invent cheap Helium 3 fusion power and show me how you'll moon harvest it, for example.  That movie trope is a real reach, for at least the time being.

But go ahead.  Few things would make me happier.

== Further out in the cosmos ==

What an era!  Only a decade ago, cosmological gravitational lenses were considered freaky marvels… wherein a giant galactic cluster at an intermediate distance bends and focuses light from objects vastly farther away, allowing us to glimpse some of the very oldest epochs in the universe. (Though some of us have speculated about them for a long time, and they figure prominently in my novel EXISTENCE.)

NASA/ESA

Now? These lenses are tools that astronomers catalogue and use, with as much familiarity and skill as their own telescopes! Moreover, there is an incredible quirk: the nearer cluster often forms multiple images of deep background objects, far beyond, arraying different versions of the same distant galaxy in an extended arc. Or in an arrangement called an ‘Einstein Cross.’ 

And since these images have slightly different transit times to our planet, we get to witness events across multiple viewing times. For example, when a supernova was spotted in one of these lensed and magnified scenes, scientists crafted models to calculate when the same explosion would appear in other focal images of the same galaxy. And lo, the stellar explosion – in a galaxy ten billion light years away – popped up as predicted! “The supernova has been nicknamed Refsdal in honor of the Norwegian astronomer Sjur Refsdal, who, in 1964, first proposed using time-delayed images from a lensed supernova to study the expansion of the Universe.”

Seriously, did you grasp how cool that is? The implications are stunning. Among them: astronomers were able to zoom in on the distant star before it exploded, knowing that it would, in advance. A kind of time travel? 

Wrap your head around it. You are a member of a species and civilization that's doing cool stuff like this! You paid pennies for it, in taxes. So tell the "mad as hell" anger merchants to get bent.

Oh, and the universe is apparently older than 6000 years. Yes it is.

== Much closer to home… ==

... astronomers have discovered the closest potentially habitable planet found outside our solar system so far, orbiting a star just 14 light years away. The planet, more than four times the mass of the Earth, is one of three that the team detected around a red dwarf star called Wolf 1061.  

Aw heck, I just alluded so I might as well... one hot topic has been the interface (if any) between science and religion. I've been writing a whole book on it(!) and contributed a chapter to Touching the Face of the Cosmos: On the Intersection of Space Travel and Religion (edited by Paul Levinson & Michael Waltemathe), which explores what may be the best motive for human exploration of space: the desire of every human being, essentially spiritual, to understand more about our place in the universe, how our lives on Earth are inextricably part of that bigger picture. 

Even most atheists will admit to that hunger... and we got our richest meal in 2015... the "best year in space, ever."

Now to even better years.  Make 2016 the one when we all - especially Americans - decide to make it very clear that we love science!